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Fast Way Upstairs: Transformation of Assyrian Hereditary Rulership in the Late Bronze Age
The chapter deals with main institutional and conceptual aspects of transition of Assyrian polity from city-state with a quite limited power of hereditary rulers to territorial state and Empire with royal autocracy and developed bureaucratic apparatus at the latter’s disposal. That process took place in the mid-fourteenth–early thirteenth centuries BCE. The situations before and after that period, including their institutional dimensions, are well-known, but the course of transition itself and its stages are more obscure. Changes in titles and epithets of the rulers in official and legal formulas, in ways of references to the rulers or their polity made by foreigners in diplomatic documents, etc., can to some degree serve as indicators of these stages. On the whole, it can be concluded that the main factor of the transition in question was successful military–territorial expansion which seems to have arisen in an explosive way (under Aššur-uballit I). Apparently, the beginning of that expansion became possible due to successful usage of the unexpectedly emerged and exceptional international conjuncture. Then, the expansion developed more or less constantly and increasingly. The author reconstructs some reflection of Assyrians themselves on this process and its key figures. He also attracts attention to some analogies between the Assyrian case and transition from the republican political order of a city-state to the regime of sole rule in classic antiquity.
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